This year the global technology world took note of the world’s largest pool of private capital — the gargantuan SoftBank Vision Fund. The tech investing landscape in 2017 has been woven around the $100-billion war chest of Masayoshi Son, the 60-year-old Japanese group’s founder, and it’s speculated that he’ll double or treble the fund’s corpus soon. From driving consolidation to ploughing billions into companies across robotics, e-commerce and on-demand transportation practically every day of this year, SoftBank has been in the news for backing entrepreneurs based in Bengaluru, Beijing and the Bay Area.

SoftBank’s most significant move in India was trying to bring two large online retail firms — Flipkart and Snapdeal — together, a deal that fell through just before the finish line.

The group went on to put more than $4 billion (double the amount it pumped in between 2014 and 2016) in India this year, rallying behind market leaders.

FEWER, BIGGER BETSSoftBank’s strategy to back potential winners in highly scalable segments like e-commerce, online payments and ride-hailing became widely apparent when it started deploying funds from its Vision Fund in 2017. The investment in India’s largest e-tailer Flipkart this year, its first from the Vision Fund locally, despite the Snapdeal merger falling through was a case in point. Its other big bet here came when it led a financing deal of $1.4 billion in Paytm, fuelling speculation that a mega merger of Flipkart and Paytm may come through in future.

SoftBank this week said it has finally picked up a 15% stake in the embattled taxi-hailing app Uber, which is being seen as another step towards consolidating the cab aggregation business. The direct impact of the Uber investment would be felt by Ola, which raised around $1 billion this year, having gotten on board China’s Tencent in an attempt to offset SoftBank’s dominance.

SoftBank in 2017 looks visibly different from when it doubled down on India three years ago. Its wager on Snapdeal and leading $90-100 million fund raises at Housing.com, Grofers and OYO now seem undersized compared to its ambitions today.

“For SoftBank, the only thing that matters is to be in the number one company. Its asset holding period is far longer and the return expectations from large cheques are lower, which means the valuation at which it enters is immaterial, relative to other traditional tech investors,” an investor said.

SoftBank is evidently chasing existing or likely winners as Rajeev Misra, CEO of the Vision Fund, told TOI in a September interview. “Consolidation is a part of human evolution. In internet, the winner takes all. You have to emerge as the winner or merge with the winner. There is no room for No. 3. Look at mature markets like China and the US, some do not even have a No. 2 player,” he’d said.

STRATEGIC INVESTMENTSThe founder of a consumer internet company says, “A single source of funding with no real competition is not good for the ecosystem. If the incentive for founders just becomes to raise from large investors, they will optimise for what investors want. Having said that, the funding freeze would be worse in India right now if SoftBank wasn’t active.”

Many in the industry feel SoftBank is a long-term strategic investor, and is not a pure-play financial backer here, as it aids the fight of domestic companies like Flipkart against dogged competition from Amazon. With its long-time affiliation to Alibaba, another major stakeholder in India, they can form a formidable anti-Amazon alliance here.

Though early-stage investments slowed, this year was defined by a few massive financing rounds and SoftBank led all of those with Alibaba and Tencent forming the other pool of capital.

As many as 31 late-stage deals led to Rs 28,810 crore of capital being raised this year compared to 49 such deals being completed in 2016 but with only Rs 6,858 crore being racked up, as per data from Paper VC, an investment data platform. This indicates how mature internet companies in India, including Flipkart, Ola and Paytm, are now reliant on SoftBank’s financial firepower as they remain private.

WARY OF DOMINANCE“Today, companies are more worried about having SoftBank on their side compared to three years ago. Their presence dilutes early-stage investors and founders as they offer more capital than anyone else. This will result in some VCs raising even larger funds next year as some reports said about Sequoia Capital in the US. It also means lesser control for founders,” says a venture investor. “SoftBank’s giant fund has made it tough to maintain ownership or any influence on companies. As an investor you need SoftBank for your portfolio companies to succeed, but you become irrelevant as soon as they come in,” points out another VC.

In India, other deep-pocketed investors like China’s two most powerful internet groups, Alibaba and Tencent, and South Africa’s Naspers are a good counterbalancing force, say industry insiders. Even as VCs see the balance of power shifting decidedly towards SoftBank, Son’s bullishness around a few top internet companies has paved the way for partial liquidity for New York-based Tiger Global and VC funds like SAIF Partners and Accel Partners who have collectively pocketed more than $1.5 billion by selling their shares to the Japanese group this year. In a market infamous for not producing any big returns for risk investors, SoftBank’s secondary share purchase in Flipkart and Paytm helped create liquidity in an exit-starved ecosystem.

The questions around SoftBank though remain — a massive pool of capital that can distort valuations, an investing team not known for scoring technology deals, and the large stakes it holds in companies along with favourable terms. And as we step into 2018, the group’s mandate to bring about global consolidation and realignment in the technology sector has only just begun.